Remembering
by Mainecoon
Summary: Remus contemplates. A short, spur-of-the-moment companion piece to a drawing I did.


"Remembering"  
  
It's not the transformations I mind so much. The hardest part is the remembering. Tearing flesh, the sound of my very soul splitting apart, a baptism of hateful, venomous saliva pumped into burning veins with a kiss prompted by an aching hunger I have now come to know so well.   
  
Children have ways of dealing with pain. They simply deny its existence. When my feral mother sunk her fateful teeth into me, I felt nothing. My reactions were instincts carefully taught to me in the womb by generations who number as the stars. They enveloped me, guiding my every move. The screams that bubbled forth from my young throat were not mine, but the echoed voice of my own father, and a million voices before who suffered death before their time. I'm sure I must have screamed louder than my father did when he died. But I don't know; I didn't see it. And my frenzied clawing at the damp earth below me as I scrambled, no matter how hopelessly, to escape - these were not my arms, my legs. These were the electrified appendages of a thousand thousand children before me who had run from shadows they could not control, from drunken fathers, abusive mothers, from the street and the dirt and the grating of bone against metal in the darkness... and from humanity's greatest fear: the wolf. Man's best friend turned on him. Against such an enemy, there is no salvation.  
  
No, I did not feel what was happening. Fear had loosened its control of my mind, if not my heart. Instead, the part of my mind that should have been afraid sat back and observed. It was safe, it did not care. Instinct had kicked in, and there was nothing more for it to do but watch the show. I had once before seen a moving picture show of the type developed by Muggles. This was not much different. The images moved at the wrong speed; the sound was muffled and slightly off, as if its addition had been a mere afterthought; and the acting was terrible. Far too dramatic. It lacked subtlety. And all that blood... that will never do. Watching this sort of rot, you'd think human being had an endless supply of metallic-smelling red stuff that they could spill from their bodies in floods. Honestly, what kind of ideas are they trying to give today's children?   
  
As an adult, it's much harder to pretend, especially when pain is a recurring miracle. Each time, the overly-curious Observer wades further into the pool of reality, all the time asking "I wonder what this feels like?" and "I wonder how that effects this apparently fragile thing I'm living in?" The Observer is a very sick individual. Even when he finds out the answer, he wants more. "Why, that pain is not too bad," he says to himself with a scholarly air. "Why, I haven't even fainted yet!" So, thusly rationalized, he takes one step forward, one step further into the abyss. One step closer to insanity.   
  
With each cycle of the moon, the memory grows sharper, not dimmer. This memory refuses to fade with time. My perverted little Observer is too fascinated with it to allow it to disappear. Only now, after years of living through the remembering month after month without fail, do I remember the excruciating pain, the numbing terror, even the feeling of my body preparing itself for death. Knowing that only serves to worsen the transformations. Because I remember the pain, I have come to expect it. Each time, I face it head-on, pretending to be unafraid. The masquerade of courage is really the only deception adults are truly adept at. We have been taught to be brave and accept pain. Children, in their infinite wisdom, know enough to run away from it, even if it is unavoidable. That's how they survive. Because they have no physical power, they must resort to using the mind. They do so admirably.   
  
Take this as a lesson, then: You children, keep your dream worlds; and you adults, let the children be. Dreams and deceptions may become your greatest defense against the most crushing enemy known to mankind...  
  
Remembering.  
  
...end...  



End file.
